Cross-Platform Play Isn’t Enough for Rocket League; Parties are Coming

Psyonix’s push for cross-platform play brought the feature and its potential into the forefront. The feature brings audiences from PC/Xbox One and PC/PS4 together. Psyonix wants to ultimately bring all three platforms together. So far, Sony isn’t on board.

But Psyonix wants more. Playing together isn’t enough. The developer wants friends on different platforms to play together. Want the smoothest experience on PC, but also want to play with your friends on Xbox One? That’s the goal with Rocket League’s new Party System.

Here’s the developer explaining the feature:

When finished, this new system will allow you to party up directly via PsyNet instead of the party systems currently used through Steam, Xbox Live, or the PlayStation Network.

First up, Psyonix will test the feature with Steam players to iron out any bugs. Why Steam? It’s easier to quickly fix issues on Steam. Pushing beta features on console isn’t ideal because any quick fix has to go through certification on both consoles first. Better to figure out all the potential issues first on PC, then push it to consoles.

Once the new party system is live, you’ll hit the ‘Create Party’ button as usual – but the invite will come via an in-game notification.

Psyonix is aiming for a Steam beta before the end of the year. If everything goes smoothly, we should see a cross-platform party system sometime next year.

Bring on cross-platform play/parties

This needs to happen. Across all platforms. A pipe dream? Probably. But it would be fantastic to see. Sure, big games like Call of Duty and Destiny don’t need it. But plenty of other games would benefit from the instant bump in player base.

Keep the competitive portions of each game split from PC and consoles, but give players the option to play together.

Rocket League is leading the push for complete cross-platform play. Let’s see if any big developers jump on too.